Healing and faith — Aberdeen family tested by severe medical conditions - East Idaho News
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Healing and faith — Aberdeen family tested by severe medical conditions

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ABERDEEN — The story of the Palmer family has a happy ending.

But for two-and-a-half years, the lives of Trent and Janilee Palmer and three of their children — Kyran, Stetson and Lindsey — were a whirlwind of illness discoveries, emergency room visits, life-saving decisions and extraordinary tests of faith.

“It had its hard moments, definitely,” Janilee said. “We had to rely on faith — that there was a plan each one of these kids had to go through, that there’s a reason they had these experiences.”

Kyran Palmer began noticing sores on his feet and swelling in his fingers.

It was February 2014, and for the first few months, Kyran tried thinking it was nothing. But when he began experiencing swelling and soreness around his ankles, knees, fingers and joints, the pain increased. After several misdiagnosises, he went to Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City in August. That’s where he was diagnosed with lupus nephritis and stage-four kidney damage. He spent eight days in the hospital where prednisone treatments relieved his pain and his doctors were hopeful his normal kidney functions would return.

Kyran began his senior year feeling better and began preparing for his final prep basketball season with the Aberdeen Tigers.

But around January 2015, Kyran was struck with additional symptoms. He was gaining water weight at an alarming rate. He began feeling so bad he couldn’t play basketball anymore. At one point, he gained 10 pounds in a day in water weight because he was told he needed to drink as much water as possible to flush his kidneys. He couldn’t hold his food down.

It was midnight, and Kyran’s parents ran him back to Primary Children’s Hospital, where it was discovered he had total kidney failure.

After immediate surgery to put a catheter in his shoulder for hemodialysis, Kyran started dialysis that day for four hours and every day after that for eight days in the hospital. After he returned home, he’d have to go to Pocatello three times a week to receive dialysis treatments. He would leave at 4:30 a.m. before returning home in time to go to school.

Though Kyran missed basketball season, he was able to help Aberdeen’s varsity boys golf team win the 2A team state championship.

On May 29, 2015, Kyran graduated from Aberdeen High School. A day later, he got another port put in so he could begin 10-hours-a-night dialysis at home. By January of 2016, it was determined his kidneys would not recover, and he was put on a transplant list.

Several family members and friends stepped forward to donate. Despite several promising initial tests, a complete match wasn’t found.

For months, the Palmer family waited.

Then, in August 2016, a donor was lined up through a six-person kidney exchange. Kyran was one of three kidney recipients in the exchange, and Janilee was one of three donors.

That procedure was Sept. 20, 2016.

To ensure his immune system doesn’t attack his new kidney, Kyran must take twice-a-day rejection medication for the rest of his life. But he’ll gladly take them considering he spent almost three years battling the effects of his illness and getting hooked up to dialysis machines.

“It didn’t even feel real until I was out of the surgery,” Kyran said. “I was just so used to doing my dialysis.

Stetson Palmer was coughing up blood.

It was early 2014 — around the same time his brother Kyran began experiencing his first symptoms back home — and Stetson was four months into his mission in South Africa for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Stetson was serving in a high desert area near Durban, South Africa, and the air quality was poor due to the abundance of mining in the region.

Stetson went to the doctor, who believed he was suffering from an infection in his lungs, gave him some antibiotics and sent him on his way.

Stetson’s symptoms never really improved until he was transferred out of the area to the coast two months later. Though he stopped coughing blood, he felt incredibly winded. He chalked it up to just being out of shape and continued his mission.

Over a year later, Stetson was transferred again, this time to the developing, third-world country of Swaziland. He spent almost an entire day on buses to get to his destination, and when he finally arrived, he nearly collapsed.

Then he coughed into his hand. He looked down. His hand was covered in blood — again.

The next day, he was admitted into a hospital, where he spent the night. A day later, Stetson was taken to Johannesburg, where the severity of his illness — an illness he’d been contending with for 16 months — was finally revealed.

“They found blood clots all the way up both of my legs,” Stetson said. “… My heart was three times the size it’s supposed to be because the arteries in the lungs are 90 percent blocked off by blood clots.”

It was determined Stetson needed to return home for treatment. But while the situation was dire, he didn’t understand why he needed to leave. Why couldn’t he just stay in South Africa, get treatment and continue his mission?

“The church-assigned doctor, Dr. Bruce Barton, came in and was talking to me, and I was still like, ‘Can’t we figure this out here?’” Stetson said. “He was like, ‘Elder Palmer, this isn’t even an issue of whether or not you’re going to finish your mission. This is an issue of if we’re going to save your life.’”

Stetson was flown home, where he waited for six months before he could have surgery to remove the clots. By then, blood thinners had dissolved the clots in his legs, but the clots in his lungs remained chronic.

Stetson had a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy performed Feb. 3, 2015 in San Diego — one of two places in the country where the surgery could be performed. His chest was cut open similar to open-heart surgery. Surgeons had to use fine instruments and cameras to go into the arteries of his lungs to cut out and remove the clots. To do that, however, they needed to cool Stetson down to 45 degrees and remove all the blood from his body.

“So they kill me,” Stetson said.

Surgeons had 20 minutes to clear out the arteries before needing to warm his body back up and refill it with his blood. Stetson was drained three times, and the operation took 10 hours.

The procedure went off without a hitch. Stetson spent nine days in recovery before being discharged feeling 100 percent. He had his energy back. The day after he left the hospital, he and his parents went to SeaWorld, where Stetson was finally able to walk without being out of breath.

“It was great,” Stetson said. “I was so sore, but I could breathe. I have so much to be thankful for.”

Lindsey Palmer was supposed to have a routine surgery.

About 10 years ago, Lindsey began suffering from acid reflux. When her symptoms steadily got worse, she was diagnosed with a hiatal hernia in a part of the stomach that worked its way back into her esophagus.

She was recommended for surgery — a nissen fundoplication — that would pull the hernia out of her esophagus, wrap the stretched bit of stomach back around itself and sew it tight. She had the procedure done in March 26, 2016.

Lindsey was put on a liquid diet for a month to give her stomach time to heal after the surgery. Four days later, however, she noticed intense pressure and shortness of breath.

“It felt like there was a bowling all in my chest,” Lindsey said. “I couldn’t breathe.”

The doctors had said those symptoms could indicate blood clots, so she went back to the hospital, where she was told the pressure was nothing to worry about. She was given laxatives and pain medication to get her food moving through her stomach, and she returned home.

There was no improvement, however. Instead, things just got worse.

“Once we got back I started throwing up,” Lindsey said. “With the (surgery), you’re never supposed to throw up again. … You’re physically unable to throw up.”

Lindsey’s vomiting became more frequent, so she returned to the hospital, where doctors were still convinced her post-op symptoms were attributed to her food not passing through her body. They tried doing ultrasounds on her stomach, but each time Lindsey drank the substance needed to perform the ultrasound, she would throw it back up. After throwing up 18 times, an NG tube was inserted through her nose, down her throat and into her stomach to pump it of its contents.

As Lindsey watched almost a week’s worth of liquid diet filter out of the tube in her nose, she began to feel better.

“It was a lot,” she said. “It filled two liters.”

Though the pressure had decreased, Lindsey still had pain. That’s when her mom stepped in.

“I became a little fiery,” Janilee said. “I was upset nothing was getting done — that they hadn’t figured out what was the matter. I said … ‘She needs a CAT scan. There’s something wrong.’ … (The doctor) wasn’t happy to listen to a mother, but my instincts said something’s the matter.”

A CAT scan was finally done on Lindsey. That’s when doctors found out her stomach was shutting down.

“(The doctor) was like, ‘Well, we know what’s wrong with you, and that’s the good news,’” Lindsey said. “‘But the bad news is we have to take you into surgery now.’”

Doctors discovered that Lindsey’s stomach had twisted around itself and had worked its way back up into her esophagus. That was why she hadn’t been able to pass anything she ingested. Fifteen minutes after the doctor told her what the problem was, she was in the operating room again.

The surgery effectively reversed everything the first surgery did, and doctors found two areas of her stomach that were black and dead. Had they waited another day, her stomach probably would’ve gone septic, and she could’ve died.

The dead parts of Lindsey’s stomach were cut out, her stomach was sewn back together, and because the first surgery was undone by the second surgery, she’s back to square one dealing with acid reflux. Doctors still aren’t sure what went wrong with the first procedure that caused so many problems for Lindsey.

“We had always asked him what is happening,” she said. “And he told us, ‘We don’t know. I’ve never seen this happen before.’”

The Palmer family goes to Bear Lake every President’s Day weekend.

Their most recent visit last February was the first time in three years they embarked on the family tradition without someone enduring a major medical issue.

“We had decided that was our new normal,” Trent said sitting at his dining room table with his wife and three healthier children. “We’re glad that’s not our normal anymore.”

While Kyran, Stetson and Lindsey each went through their share of hardship with timelines that intertwined around each other, their ordeals have brought the family nearer to God, closer together and tighter with the Aberdeen community.

When local folks found out about the stresses the family was braving, they came together to finish two bathroom remodeling projects in the Palmer family’s home while they were away for a month during Kyran’s transplant.

When Trent and Janilee’s three children were better, they discussed how the role of family is vital in times of adversity and peril.

And when things looked bleak and doubt crept in, they leaned on their faith to get them through.

“That was the only thing that got me through was the many, many prayers that I had to say and the many prayers offered in our behalf,” Janilee said. “Sometimes you feel so alone. I was sitting with these guys in the hospital rooms so alone, and I would just pray. … Several times. I asked, ‘Why does he have to go through this at such a young age and then have to live with it for the rest of his life?’ We have faith that the Lord has a plan for each of us.Once we turn our trial over to the Lord and do all that we can, he will bless us. We are so blessed.”

This article was originally published in the Idaho State Journal. It is used here with permission.

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